This data release is composed of tables from a database of United States Congressional statistics spanning the time period 1789 through 1989. The sources of the data were studies in the ICPSR collection and other historical texts and studies. There are eleven data files in total, including two additional tables that have been added since the first release. Some files contain records for additional Congresses. The rows in the various files describe different entities. For example, in the Votes Table file, each row contains a record of a vote by a particular member on a particular roll call vote. The Member Table file contains a record for each member of Congress, while the Serves Table file contains a record for each member for every Congress in which he or she served. See the descriptions of each file in the codebook for details about its contents. The data from the various files can be combined by matching the fields that they have in common. Cross-file searches should be conducted using the Member_ID field. However, not every file has the Member_ID field. In those cases, an alternative common field should be used.

This data has been reviewed and processed by ICPSR staff. In
cases where errors could be determined, they were corrected. In some instances, an error was found but no corrective solution was possible.

During processing some variable names were truncated to eight characters. In those cases, efforts were made to make the variable names as similar to the original name as possible. The variable labels were not changed to ensure agreement between the statistical files and the codebook.

2009-02-03 Parts 10 (Committee Table) and 11 (Roll Call Table) have been added to this release. In addition, all parts of this study now have SAS, SPSS, and Stata setup and ready-to-go files.

2006-01-18 File CB3371.ALL.PDF was removed from any previous datasets and flagged as a study-level file, so that it will accompany all downloads.

2004-12-08 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

Created variable labels and/or value labels.

Performed recodes and/or calculated derived variables.

Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.

Notes

Data in this collection are available only to users at ICPSR member institutions.

The citation of this study may have changed due to the new version control system that has been implemented. Please see version history for more details.

This study is provided by ICPSR. ICPSR provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for a diverse and expanding social science research community.